[Chicago.CBSLocal] A former U.S. attorney representing embattled Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. is negotiating a plea deal with the federal government, CBS 2 has learned.

CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine has the exclusive details.

The plea deal would end Jacksons 17-year career as a congressman representing Chicagos South Side and suburbs.

At the center of negotiations is white-collar criminal defense attorney Dan Webb, who served as Chicagos top federal prosecutor in the 1980s, when several Cook County judges were indicted for public corruption under the Operation Greylord investigation.

Webb, the chairman of Winston & Strawn LLP in Chicago, has been the point person for Jackson in talks with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington.

The tentative deal includes:

Jackson resigning for health reasons.

His pleading guilty to charges involving misuse of campaign funds.

The congressmans repayment of any contributions that were converted to personal use, such as home furnishings, improper travel or gifts.

But not Fridays; that would be religious (Progressivism IS a religion.) Besides Monday has a catchier alliteration.
Under a resolution unanimously approved by the city council this week, all future Mondays in the City of Angels have been declared "Meatless Mondays."

It's part of an international campaign to cut down on meat consumption for health and environmental reasons.Of course there are a number of studies showing high meat protein diets are actually healthier.

#1
Robert Heinlein called this sort of thing years ago. It costs more money to raise animals (and farm in general) than it did years ago, farmers don't get the respect they once did, so fewer people go into farming and those who do work increasingly for Sovkhoz agribusiness. Add to that the fact that we're increasingly squeamish as a society when not murdering each other or playing computer games, and we find butchers and meat cutters becoming rarer. Mostly they've been replaced by machines, but somebody's got to herd the animals in to be slaughtered and it ain't gonna be Peace Studies majors.

Probably because of its increasing cost, paradoxically, people look increasingly for prime, rather than choice or grade A. The culture's pushing 'Angus beef,' implying it's better than prime. So what meat's sold is simply mislabeled.

You can't buy mutton anymore, and you have to search for a couple days to find lamb. Rabbit's almost gone from the meat locker, despite the fact that they're as easy to raise as chickens. Fishermen are admired from a distance but up close you can smell the fish and see the fish heads and scales and guts so proper liberal artists don't want to go into commercial fishing, or even go fishing because how would you feel with a hook through your cheek, being dragged away from all your fishy friends?

We now eat abominations like 'turkey bacon' and veggie burgers and substitute portobello mushrooms and tofu for real meat. Yeast vats and soylent green aren't too far in the future.

#6
Probably because of its increasing cost, paradoxically, people look increasingly for prime, rather than choice or grade A. The culture's pushing 'Angus beef,' implying it's better than prime. So what meat's sold is simply mislabeled.

It's not a paradox, it's simple economics. The best Florida Oranges are not eaten in Florida, they are sent north, the freight & handling being the same for good or average oranges. The same holds true for tomatoes and shrimp :(

I guess we good the good Idaho potatoes here, but it's not much consolation really.

#8
At what point do they pass an ordinance that fast food must close on Monday. Probably a decade away but I imagine its coming.

Of course California may collapse and everything turn sane as we dig our way through the economic rubble and try to put the place back together again. With a corrupt politician on every lamp post we might not have time to worry about meat mondays.

#9
Part of me wonders why the environmentalists haven't pushed for more mutton and less cattle. They could then push to have more land given over to mutton production and curtail the growth of suburbs. I could be wrong but I think sheep do far less environmental damage.

We could then have shepherds bring flocks in to trim the grass on golf courses and in parks (the way they do on levees in Germany) and such to avoid the horrible power mowers. Yes, sheep droppings will be everywhere, but that is the cost of the environment.

Since mutton is somewhat tasteless the conversion to soy mutton would be easier for people to make when the time comes.

#11
rjschwarz, sheep can actually do more damage. If they aren't kept moving from pasture to pasture, they will clip the grass down so low that it dies and then you have erosion to deal with as well. There is a reason beef is more popular in this country than sheep. Cattle are easier to raise with less land here.

Now in a country like Greece with those hills, sheep makes a lot more sense.

#16
Time for civil disobedience. Eat meat on Mondays. Follow city councilmen and take pictures of them at local restaurants. Or, do guerilla theater: if a councilman is at a public event on a Monday, purchase a steak for him and have it delivered, "Compliments of the chef." If you run a food truck or hot dog stand, show up at City Hall at lunch time with your Sabrett's or Hebrew Nationals'. Gift your favorite councilman with a salami from Katz's. You know: "Send a salami to your boy in the Army."

Next, if you own a restaurant, ask the Institute for Justice to help you with a lawsuit, alleging restraint of trade. Start recall petitions. If you're a parent of a school-age child, pack a corned beef sandwich for his lunch. Drive the foodies nuts: add a Twinkie. After all, Twinkies are only illegal in San francisco.

If you're a kid, buy some brownies or cookies from the grocery or Costco. Package them for individual sale, and sell them to your fellow students. After all, capitalism is good. Tell your fellow students that you're not charging any sales tax.

#20
Because sending people to Gulags + Death Camps for opposing the State + State Socialism is less horrible to the Lefties than raising and later killing a cow for tasty steaks-n-burgers, aka CHEAP FOOD - D *** NG IT, YOU'RE HURTING THE COW'S FEELINGS BY FIRST ENSLAVING IT, AND THEN LATER AGAIN BY KILLING IT!

ZOOOMG, ZOOOMG!

As per #18 + "rebellious natures", AT FREE REPUBLIC > looks like Petitions have been drawn to allow the US States of Lousiana + now Texas to formally withdraw or secede from the Union???

[Canada.com] Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore will try to make the case next week that "dirty energy" is contributing to what he calls "dirty weather" events around the world.
"Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come," Gore wrote in a recent opinion piece in the Huffington Post. "We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather."

Gore will deliver his message on Nov. 15 through a new presentation in New York as part of his Climate Reality Project, to be broadcast on the Internet. The initiative was launched last year as a 24-hour event with slide-show presentations from around the world, highlighting the latest news about human influence on global warming.

Maggie Fox, the CEO of the project, said that although scientists cannot link global warming to specific storms, there is evidence warmer temperatures and oceans make storm systems stronger, leading to devastating impacts such as those caused by Sandy in the United States and Canada.
According to a 2010 analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science in the U.S., nearly 98 per cent of the most-active climate change scientists in peer-reviewed journals support evidence that human activity is causing global warming.

[Washington Times] According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which tracks party representation in the countrys 50 state governments, Democrats now control all three bases of power  the governorship and both houses of the state legislature  in 14 states and Republicans in 23, with only 12 states sharing power. (Nebraskas unicameral legislature is considered nonpartisan.)

Regional power bases are also emerging, with Democrats increasingly dominating state governments across New England.

Conversely, after last weeks vote, the GOP for the first time since 1872 now controls the Arkansas House and Senate. Just 20 years ago, Republicans didnt have a majority in a single legislative house in the states of the old Confederacy  now they control all 11.

The number of states with divided government is down from 31 just 16 years ago to 12 today, prompting speculation on the countrys evolving partisan geography.

#2
Take CA for example - There are only a handful of Republicans left. It is pretty much a Democratic supermajority plus Moonbeam as guv. If the remaining Republicans were smart vs egotistic they would resign and let the chips fall where they may, let the inevitable destruction happen faster, 5 years instead of 10 maybe? Then CA could lick her wounds and IF, very big IF, the lesson has been learned, CA would have the potential to be the Phoenix that rises from the ash heap of liberalism. Probably just a pipe dream.

Florida just can't seem to count votes properly. After the embarrassing "hanging chad" debacle of the 2000 presidential election, similar games are now being played in the contest between Republican Rep. Allen West and Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy over the 18th Congressional District seat. Mr. Murphy claims 160,328 votes to Mr. West's 157,872, but the GOP is questioning the integrity of the vote count, particularly in St. Lucie County.

On election night, Mr. West had maintained a district-wide lead of nearly 2,000 votes until the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections inexplicably "recounted" thousands of early ballots, resulting in an awfully convenient 4,400-vote shift in favor of the challenger. Observers on the scene charged incompetence, intimidation and possible fraud on the part of local election officials. Mr. West has asked a judge to impound the ballots and order a recount to set things straight.

Lawyers for the West campaign have been overseeing the process at the Riviera Beach vote tabulation center, and they told The Washington Times that they're concerned about what they have been seeing. Temporary workers are helping the local staff oversee the count of absentee ballots, those damaged by voting machines and ballots in which the three pages have become separated. They are making new ballots to replace the damaged ones, and are required to mark them with the same votes. Florida law allows observers to be present during this process, however, election officials are effectively denying poll watchers an opportunity to keep tabs on what's going on.

The local bureaucrats erected a physical barrier making it impossible for the observers to see the counting process. After repeated objections, observers were allowed to stand behind the people reproducing the ballots, but then the ballot workers blocked their view. The Republicans had no way to verify whether ballots were being accurately reproduced because they couldn't see what was happening. In fact, an elderly man who stood up to try to get a better look was ordered to sit down. When he asked why, elections supervisor Susan Bucher called a sheriff's deputy to have him escorted out of the building. Team West volunteer Ellen Snyder has also faced the wrath of the supervisory staff. "They screamed at me twice," she said, because she asked questions. They threatened to have her removed as well.

Mrs. Bucher, a hyperpartisan Democrat, has infuriated the GOP. When responding to a court order to open polls to early voters on the Sunday before the election, she only informed local Democrats, not Republicans. During the week she told Republican observers that counting has ceased and they did not have to show up. Observers who came anyway saw the count continuing. On Friday, she ordered ballot workers to reproduce some ballots that were already reproduced and would not explain why.

The tactics being employed in the Sunshine State undermine the credibility of the final result. It's hard to see how anything legitimate could come out of such a tainted counting procedure. It will be up to the State of Florida, or the House of Representatives, to determine who truly won the right to represent Floridians in the 18th District.

#1
Unfortunately, economy, events, and performance driven voting is history. We have begun to devolve to the African political model. Demographic voting is the new norm. The sooner the pubs get on board with demographic voting, the sooner they start winning. Civilization as we have know it will lose, but the pubs will win.

#3
Would not have mattered g(r)om. Critical thinking as an element of decision making no longer applies. The Champ had/has only one issue, one mantra; "the rich should pay a little more". Valid issues are no longer in play. Demographic voting is the new norm.

#5
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
― Alexis de Tocqueville

#6
I'm guessing West will 'lose' again on the re-recount. Or the re-re-recount. There's lots of uncounted votes tucked away in the corners of the union hall. And you know most of the people in the morgue managed to vote before deceasing and their votes have to be counted.

#9
I worked the polls (in FL) on election day. One thing I noticed is that alot of registered democrats showed up to vote in the last 2 hours. The Republicans were MIA.

I am convinced the dems won the state on the evening of 11/06 due to their "get out the vote"
effort.

Romney's GOTV effort (project ORCA) was so mismanaged that he would have been better served if he had taken the money he spent on ORCA it in a parking lot. It was worse than useless: it actually cost him votes.

#14
Frozen Al's pegged it - Ogabe's turnout machine was just better organized. The bad guys had been working to set up their 2012 GOTV efforts ever since Ogabe took office. Where the hell was the comparable GOP effort? Why was it left up to Romney's campaign to cobble together its ORCAbortion in a few months leading up to the election, when it should have been the RNC getting a GOTV infrastructure set up, tested and in place over a period of YEARS, ready for the use of whoever wound up as the Trunks' nominee?

Reince Priebus underperformed the sad lump of clay Michael Steele as RNC chair to the tune of over 2 million votes - votes that would have given us President Romney, possibly a Trunk Senate and at least a chance to start reversing what now looks like an inevitable national collapse. I'd call for Priebus to walk the plank in favor of someone who knows what they're doing (my dream team would have been Newt and Sarah as RNC co-chairs). But now that the Quislingrats and their media sockpuppets have figured out how to exploit and expand election-day tribalism, I don't think it makes a damn bit of difference anymore. Alinsky, Ayers, Cloward, Piven and the rest of the long-march crowd have won.

#15
I've been tied up, but I find it amazing that this is apparently the first time Orca has hit the 'Burg (though I may have missed it). We lost FL by about 75,000 votes, and similar in the other contested states.

I think most of the missing votes (less than McCain) were due to Orca. Don't ascribe to veniality what can be explained by stupidity. Incredible incompetence! Anyone who has developed systems like this expects the issues they hit and plans for them. And stress tests. And has an independent Plan B.

The rest (this time) were due to Sandy (thanks Christie, you're dead to me) and, of course, the MSM.

But the Republican party is a sure loser from here on, unless we take it over and change its direction.

The beginning of the end came for CIA Director David Petraeus when Paula Broadwell, a younger married woman with whom he was having an affair, "or someone close to her had sought access to his email," according to the Wall Street Journal's description of an FBI probe. Associates of Petraeus had received "anonymous harassing emails" that were then traced to Broadwell, ABC's Martha Raddatz reported, suggesting she may have found their names or addresses in his e-mail.

The e-mail account was apparently Petraeus's personal Gmail, not his official CIA e-mail, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's a big deal: Some of the most powerful foreign spy agencies in the world would love to have an opening, however small, into the personal e-mail account of the man who runs the United States' spy service. The information could have proved of enormous value to foreign hackers, who already maintain a near-constant effort to access sensitive U.S. data.

If Petraeus allowed his Gmail security to be compromised even slightly, by widening access, sharing passwords or logging in from multiple addresses, it would have brought foreign spy agencies that much closer to a treasure trove of information. As the Wall Street Journal hints, Sherlocks were concerned about Petraeus's Gmail access precisely because of the history of foreign attempts to access just such accounts:

Security officials are sensitive to misuse of personal email accounts--not only official accounts--because there have been multiple instances of foreign hackers targeting personal emails.

A personal e-mail account like Petraeus's almost certainly would not have contained any high-level intelligence; he probably didn't keep a list of secret drone-base coordinates on his Google...contributed $814,540 to the 2008 Obama campaign... docs account. But access to the account could have provided telling information on, for example, Petraeus's travel schedule, his foreign contacts, even personal information about himself or other senior U.S. officials.

Private e-mail services like Google's, though considered significantly more secure than most, still have susceptibilities to foreign intrusion. And it happens. Technology writers have sometimes discussed what one writer called the "password fallacy," the false sense of safety created by access systems such as Google's that balance security against ease of use.

Even with Google's extra security features, the company must also avoid making security so onerous as to drive away customers, making it an easier target for foreign hackers even before Petraeus possibly started sharing access and thus diluting the account's integrity. And, as a Wired magazine investigation demonstrated in August, personal e-mail accounts often allow hackers access to other personal accounts, worsening both the infiltration and the damage.

All of this might sound a little overly apprehensive -- really, U.S. national security is compromised because the CIA director's personal Gmail account might have been a little easier to hack? -- until you start looking at the scale and sophistication of foreign attempts to infiltrate U.S. data sources. Chinese hacking efforts, perhaps the best-known but nowhere near the only threat to U.S. networks and computers, suggest the enormous scope and ferocious drive of foreign government hackers.

Some Americans who have access to sensitive information and who travel to China describe going to tremendous lengths to minimize government efforts to seize their data. Some copy and paste their passwords from USB thumb drives rather than type them out, for fear of key-logging software. They carry "loaner" laptops and cellphones and pull out cellphone batteries during sensitive meetings, worried that the microphone could be switched on remotely. The New York Times...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... called such extreme measures, which also apply in other countries, "standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies."

Even still, the publicly reported incidents of successful Chinese hacking -- such as a March intrusion that stole a $1 billion, 10-year research project overnight -- suggest that the efforts might be near-continuous and the successes rampant. A 2010 Chinese infiltration of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ended up funneling weeks of corporate data; even after the chamber thought it had reestablished security, it discovered that an office printer and a corporate apartment thermostat were still sending data -- who knows what kind? -- back to China. You have to wonder what a similar infiltration into the private e-mail account of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency might have turned up.

Of course, the CIA director is not the Chamber of Commerce, which may explain why the FBI's counter-intelligence monitoring is so sensitive that just Broadwell's access to his Gmail account triggered an investigation. But the fact that the FBI looked so hard and so carefully -- and that Petraeus lost his directorship of the CIA over an intrusion that many of us might consider minor or even routine -- underscores the potential risk to U.S. intelligence entailed in Petraeus's, or Broadwell's, alleged misuse of his personal account.

#1
Petraeus is not the kind of guy to say anything about his work on a personal email - he knows better than that. Likewise, there's no way I'd believe that the man would ever allow himself to be blackmailed. It's not happening. There is zero evidence that he did anything wrong - in terms of disclosing national secrets. Did he make some bad judgments about personal relationships - sure. But he could have been allowed to retire and keep his dignity.

#6
and pull out cellphone batteries during sensitive meetings, Ahem, I seem to remember reading something about re-energizing units by bathing the conference room with microwaves of the right frequency. 3DC?

A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.